Famous Vita hacker digs hole into PlayStation Classic’s motherboard. Here’s what happens next

Despite the clickbait title (which I promise has an explanation if you keep reading), this is an actual article about the fast progress being made on hacking the Playstation Classic.

The Playstation Classic is out as of yesterday. The device is getting terrible reviews so far, mostly for its sub-par experience despite being pretty expensive. Still, there’s hope for the device, as hackers from around the world have started looking into it, in the hope that we can crack the device open, and potentially load additional games onto it, or more.

What’s known about the Playstation Classic so far

TL,DR; here are a few of the things that have been found out about the PS Classic in the past few days:

The Playstation Classic runs a flavor of Android/Linux 32 bits, ships with 16GB of memory, enough to store the games it comes preloaded with.

USB devices such as keyboards are detected by the device. Allegedly it is possible to access a secret emulator menu by hitting the escape key on a USB keyboard connected to the device.

The firmware of the device has apparently already been dumped, with some parts being encrypted.

Hackers believe the device should be extremely easy to hack once the firmware is analyzed.

Playstation Classic ongoing hacks

Some of Yifanlu’s ongoing research on the Playstation Classic

The Nintendo “Mini” series (Mini NES and Mini SNES) has been made popular in part because of the visible effort that was put into it from Nintendo, but also because of the extended life it got from hacks that allowed the device to load the entire NES and SNES library.

It’s not unreasonable to think that the Playstation Classic could have a similar bright future, if it can be hacked. It had already been established that the console runs a flavor of Android, and uses the PCSX ReArmed emulator internally, meaning extended it sounds extremely feasible.

Hackers Davee, xyz, yifanlu, as well as PSP/Vita scene Veteran EmuOnPSP,nvsofts , and v9938 have started looking into the device. Allegedly, v9938 was able to dump the firmware, with some parts still encrypted. The Japanese hacker also shared information on how the dump was achieved.

In the meantime, xyz has shared the modifications (publicly available) that Sony made to the emulator in order to port it to their device.

Yifanlu has been sharing a bunch of interesting videos on his twitch account, showing him trying to dump the console’s firmware live through hardware and software means. Ultimately, the audience got to witness him drilling gigantic holes into the motherboard, and killing the console in the process. (He’s getting a new one soon to resume his experiments). So, if you were wondering about my clickbait title, that’s where it came from.

Playstation Classic Secret Menu access

In less “hardcore” but possibly even more interesting news, it is allegedly possible to access the emulator’s menu on the console by plugging a keyboard (only some brands such as logitech and corsair seem to work) into the device and hitting the escape key.

The “secret” emulator menu on the Playstation classic, allegedly can be accessed without a hack, simply a keyboard plugged into the device

There’s obviously still a lot to be discovered about the Playstation Classic before it is turned into an interesting emulator device, but it’s impressive to see how far hackers have already gone, one day after the device’s release.

I watched the whole stream a total of over 6hrs…. lol it was very very fun to see a master scrap dig and almost reach the other side of the board to get the cmd pin to stop grounding out…. @frowololo there was only 1 hole btw lmao j/s